REGIONAL COMPARISONS: THE WORLDWIDE SURVEY OF FITNESS TRENDS

Abstract

For the last 14 years, the editors of ACSM’s Health & Fitness Journal® (FIT) have administered an electronic survey to thousands of fitness professionals around the world to determine health and fitness trends (1-14). The survey helps predict annual health and fitness trends in a systematic way using the same methodology and helps to guide health fitness programming efforts around the world. Although the number of participating countries has ranged from 10 to 36 depending on the year, both Europe and South America have independently sought to utilize the worldwide ACSM survey to explore their own fitness sectors. Additionally, China is in its third consecutive year of surveillance and also has contributed to the Worldwide Fitness trends. Even though there could be an assumption that many trends identified in ACSM’s Worldwide Survey of Fitness Trends also may appear in other regions, this may not be the case. Therefore, it is important to have specific data from several European and South American countries to add to the established China and North America surveys to provide a more global understanding as to what extent the trends are confirmed in different regions around the world. In this article, the top 20 fitness trends from surveys in North America, China, Europe, and South America are compared. The authors thank our colleagues from Europe, South America, and China for replicating the methodology of ACSM’s Worldwide Survey of Fitness Trends in an effort to provide guidance for health fitness professionals in their region.